Entertainment

How Digital Media Is Changing the Sports Experience

Warren Packard is the cofounder and CEO of Thuuz, a service that alerts you to the most exciting sports games and matches currently being played or recently completed so that you can experience all the suspense and excitement of the best sports action of the day.

The way we think about watching sports is going through a rapid transformation. Attendance is down across most leagues but TV ratings are up. Fans seem to be more wrapped up in the sagas of individual athletes than they are in following their favorite teams.

With the proliferation of HDTVs, mobile devices, Twitter and fantasy leagues, we’re always connected to sports. Today, we don’t even bat an eyelash when fans in Seattle cheer for Tampa Bay quarterback Josh Freeman — after all, he’s on their fantasy team.

The way we stay connected to athletes though Twitter and fantasy sports has allowed us to gain unprecedented access to their lives, and it’s changing our perception of who they are. In our celebrity-obsessed world, technology is our bridge to a new kind of personal relationship with our sports idols.

Skipping the Stadium

As new technology emerges, it is clear that the out-of-stadium experience has finally caught up, and in some ways surpassed watching an event from the bleachers.

Sports broadcasting has become an assembly line of innovation, churning out new features that enhance the viewing experience and bring fans even closer to the minutia of each game. During the NBA playoffs this year, TNT allowed fans to view a video mosaic comprised of individual cameras focused on specific players and teams. In the near future, our tablets, smartphones and laptops will recognize what game we’re watching on TV and give us a personalized experience on the second screen. You’ll have the entire world of sports in the palm of your hand, and it will be personalized based on what you want and when you want it. Imagine plugging your fantasy team into that on a Sunday afternoon.

Fantasy Teams

Technology has had the greatest impact on how we play fantasy sports. It's not impossible to imagine a Red Zone-like channel that aggregates stats and clips from your fantasy team. Twitter will also source your data cloud, creating personalized streams that include tweets from the players themselves, as well as the reaction to those players from the media. This is the future of fantasy sports, a $3.8 billion industry where the average fan spends more than $150 per year on products that don’t even really exist.

We used to mock the fantasy sports fanatic’s childlike dedication to games that had long passed them by, and wondered why they couldn’t simply enjoy the action. Today we swipe furiously at smartphones, making last-minute lineup changes because of a key tweet about the state of a star quarterback's throwing arm.

The Internet has opened up this entirely new and lucrative arena for the sports "quant jock." This new breed of sports fan often cares less about the outcome of the game and more about the performance of the players on his fantasy team. Just ask Maurice Jones Drew, who created some controversy in 2009 when he took a knee on the goal line and was practically forced to apologize to his fantasy fans.

One of Us

Shaquille O'Neal, one of the greatest marketers in modern sports, recently announced his retirement on Twitter. In that 10-second video, Shaq showed that despite his talents, he was a regular guy like us. Marketers have been trying to humanize athletes for years. When you can take athletes off their pedestals, you start to realize that beyond the money and tremendous athletic ability, many of them are not so different from us. For the first time, we have a direct outlet to almost all of them and they have a direct outlet to us.

The athlete in the Twitter age has almost complete control over how the public views him or her and it will likely make or break many endorsement contracts in the near future. Big money is involved, and while many athletes will seize upon this as an opportunity to let their personality shine, others will rise and fall with their own mistakes.

Getting Personal

While it’s nothing new to root for your favorite athlete from another town, it’s something new to be able to watch them whenever you want, follow them on Twitter and pick them third in your fantasy draft. In the past few years alone, we have witnessed a great migration of athletes who have busted out of the sports page and onto the entertainment and lifestyle scene.

These new technologies have continued to blur the lines between the athlete and the fan, placing average Janes and Joes on the field, in the lockeroom or smack-dab in the everyday lives of their favorite celebrity-athletes. We’ll always root for our favorite teams and we’ll cry when they lose, but technology is bringing us a new kind of personal relationship with the athletes we adore. It might just change our perception of what it means to be a fan.

Mashable
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